O'Hagan, L.A. orcid.org/0000-0001-5554-4492 (2020) Steal not this book my honest friend : threats, warnings and curses in the Edwardian book. Textual Cultures, 13 (2). pp. 244-274. ISSN 1933-7418
Abstract
This article explores the role of the book inscription as an important rite of property in Edwardian Britain (1901–1914). In particular, it uses a multimodal ethnohistorical approach to examine the use of ownership marks as threats, warnings, and curses, and to explore how they were employed by their owners to deter potential malefactors. It reveals that these inscriptions were discursive acts that operated on a cline of politeness that stretched from mitigated to stronger ownership claims. However, while in the Medieval period book curses carried a serious threat of punishment, by the Edwardian era, most were written out of adherence to social tradition, thus their force lay in performing rather than describing a future act. This suggests that in the early twentieth century, book inscriptions were strongly linked to their owners’ social class and functioned symbolically to index ownership, property rights and power.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2020 The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Sociological Studies (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number Economic and Social Research Council ES/T009012/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 07 Jan 2021 07:38 |
Last Modified: | 07 Jan 2021 07:39 |
Published Version: | https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/tex... |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Society for Textual Scholarship |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.14434/textual.v13i2.31604 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:169711 |